The leading body of the United Nations focused on trade and development, UNCTAD, is warning that international investment in 2025 has turned negative due to changes in global trade policy including tariff uncertainty.
While there had been modest growth in global investment at the start of the year, trade tensions have led to downward revisions in most indicators of foreign direct investment (FDI), according to the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development’s World Investment Report 2025, released on Thursday. This includes gross domestic product, capital formation, exports of goods and services, foreign exchange, financial market volatility, and investor sentiment.
“Taking all of these together, they almost all have been revised in the direction of higher risk, lower growth, lower investment, and so forth, since the beginning of this year,” said Richard Bolwijn, one of the authors of the report and head of the Investment Research Branch Division on Investment and Enterprise for UNCTAD. “If we take the projections by the IMF, the World Bank, and other institutions that provide us with the raw data for these indicators, they have all worsened since January. Moderate growth expectations we might have had early in the year have now all disappeared,” he said.
